[Illustration: The Captain makes advances to a little Indian girl]
Captain Seth Bullock, however, belonged to the minority, for no turn of the wheel could destroy his usefulness to the community, and his large philosophy of the plains enabled him to fit into and hold his place through every shift of surroundings. The Captain’s family came from Virginia, but he was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1849. Before he was twenty he had found his way to Montana, and built for himself a reputation for justice which at that day and in that community could only be established by cold and dauntless courage.
One of the feats of his early days of which he was justly proud was when he had himself hung the first man to be hung by law in Montana. The crowd of prospectors and cow-punchers did not approve of such an unusual, unorthodox method of procedure as the hanging of a man by a public hangman after he had been duly tried and sentenced. They wished to take the prisoner and string him up to the nearest tree or telegraph-pole, with the readiness and despatch to which they were accustomed. To evidence their disapproval they started to shoot at the hangman; he fled, but before the crowd could secure their victim, the Captain had the mastery of the situation, and, quieting his turbulent fellow citizens with a cold eye and relentless six-shooter, he himself performed the task that the hangman had left unfinished. The incident inspired the mob with a salutary respect for the law and its ability to carry out its sentences. I do not remember whether the Captain was mayor or sheriff at the time. He was trusted and admired as well as feared, and when he was barely twenty-two he was elected State senator from Helena, the largest town in the then territory of Montana.
It was in 1876 that the Captain first went to the Black Hills, that lovely group of mountains in the southwestern corner of South Dakota. He came with the first rush of prospectors when the famous Hidden Treasure Mine was discovered. On the site of what is at present the town of Deadwood he set up a store for miners’ supplies, and soon had established himself as the arm of the law in that very lawless community. That was the Captain’s rôle all through his life. In the early years he would spend day and night in the saddle in pursuit of rustlers and road-agents. When he once started on the trail nothing could make him relinquish it; and when he reached the end, his quarry would better surrender without drawing. He had a long arm and his district was known throughout the West as an unhealthy place for bad men. Starting as federal peace officer of the Black Hills, he later became marshal and sheriff of the district, and eventually marshal of South Dakota, which position he held until 1914. As years passed and civilization advanced, his bag of malefactors became less simple in character, although maintaining some of the old elements. In 1908 he wrote me: